A STEM Funder’s Latest Cause: Bringing More Experimentation to Classrooms

“When the executive director of a major STEM nonprofit started asking teachers about what challenges they faced, she didn’t expect the answer to hit so close to home. Again and again, teachers brought up that they felt frustrated and discouraged from experimenting with their teaching, in part because the possibility of failure, said Talia Milgrom-Elcott, the executive director of 100Kin10, a nonprofit focused STEM teacher training.

This problem is particularly bad for STEM teachers because experimentation is so baked into the values and methodology of the field. “If we can’t let teachers experiment and authentically fail themselves, it’s very hard to teach experimentation,” Milgrom-Elcott said. The organization is putting up $1 million to solve this problem.”